Katia Kapovich was born in Kishinev, Moldova. She emigrated from the Soviet Union where she had been a member of a literary dissident movement, in 1990. She lives and works in Cambridge, Mass. with her husband, the poet Philip Nikolaiev and their child Sophia. In 1993 and 1994 she taught Russian Literature at Boston College. She and her husband co-edit a new English-language poetry magazine, Fulcrum.

Her poems are tiny narratives, exquisitely crafted, rhymed and quite complex.  Her first book День Ангела и Ночь (Day and Night of the Angel), was published in Israel in 1992, and the poems in this collection written in the 1990s come from that book. She also writes fluently in English which proves that Katia Kapovich is that rarest of poets: one who is bilingual.

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Her interest in narrative poetry (she wrote a “non-Soviet” long poem at the age of eight) led to a book-length poem, Суфлер (The Prompter, 1998) and to the statement that if Mandelstam had survived he would have written a brilliant narrative poem.  It is Mandelstam in particular who shines through her poetry and in another English poem

“Blacklisted Titles” she describes a clandestine visit to the banned books section of the USSR Academy of Science Local Branch:  

LINKS:

Critiques and Biographies

Russian poems

more Russian poems

English poems

Personal pages and interviews

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АВТОНАТЮРМОРТ В ПИЖАМЕ

ЗАМОК

КВАРТИРА НОМЕР 7-А

At the Kishinev School for Deaf and Mute Children

Self-Portrait in Pajamas

Prague

Apartment 7-A

DEJA VU, DEJA ENTENDU...

Сильве Аппель                  

За ночь курс листвы упал,

кроны брошены на ветер.

Люди гибнут за металл,

что ржавеет на рассвете.

Словно ножницы ≈ стрижи

дождевые режут нити.

Ты ж на память завяжи

узелок в обгон событий.

Скоро, скоро ничего

не останется меж нами,

лишь цветастое шитье,

сброшенное тополями.

Впору в пальцы брать иглу,

и лишь только иней треснет,

приторачивать к стеклу

распустившуюся пестрядь.

Осеняй, окно на юг,

блеском осени, которой, ≈

спохватившись завтра вдруг, ≈

не найдем за пыльной шторой.

Пролететь должны века

по параболам парабол,

когда чья-нибудь рука

выронит иголку на пол.

В мешковине туч блеснет

бледный луч, острее шила.

Сквозь дырявый небосвод

ты увидишь все, что было.

DEJA VU, DEJA ENTENDU

for my great-aunt

At the season's stock exchange
fallen leaves are cheaply sold
and the heart's October rage
goes for quickly rusting gold.

Swifts, like scissors flitting by,
cut the threads of rain apart,
so your memory can tie
a transparent silky knot.

Soon you'll travel over miles
of arcane embroidery
shed by poplars, oaks and elms
all along your route to me.

Then it will be time again
for fresh needlework, as frost
stitches back to windowpanes
a whole florid paradise lost.

But for now you focus on
rain on brilliant leaves, high autumn's
sodden spell, which before long
will be gone behind the curtains.

Ages must float by on end
down parabolas, before
absent-mindedly a hand
drops a needle to the floor.

Brisk and sharp, a golden beam
will protrude through sackcloth skies.
Everything your eyes have seen
will flood back into your eyes.

translated by Philip Nikolayev

Forbidden Fellini

  The Union of Moldavian Cinematographers

  had a film archive

  where they showed European and American movies,

  but only to members of the Union itself.

  Located in a large crimson villa

  built by the Dutch architect Bernardadsey

  in the New Tradition style,

  the place was surrounded by a handsome

  wrought iron grille

  and guarded from within by a Soviet militia woman.

  The villa faced the city prison on the other side of the plaza.

  A square "park area," scantily planted with trees,

  lay in between. In winter the park

  became translucent, black and white.

  Two distinct crowds would often gather there:

  those coming to see a film,

  and those coming to see a relative in the prison.

  The former loudly debated Visconti and Bergman,

  while latter stared at the snow and shared booze,

  smoking self-rolled cigs and spitting.

  Every member of the Union was entitled to invite

  one adult guest. One evening, in late December 1980,

  just a few days before New Year's Eve,

  my friend Liuba, a young animation artist,

  called to remind me to bring my passport

  to "verify my age," so that she could take me to see

  Fellini"s Amarcord.

  We met at an empty bus stop and walked

  across the icy park. It was freezing cold,

  the air was pregnant with snow.

  The olive trees and mulberry shrubs

  stood bare, waiting to be covered.

  We entered the foyer;

  a warm velvet dusk wrapped around us.

  Liuba insisted on treating me to Champagne

  in the buffet. "It's dirt-cheap here," she said,

  "for the elite." We waited in a line;

  nobody seemed to be in a hurry.

  Soon we plumped down on purple seats

  in the huge and almost empty auditorium,

  and the lights went out. The film

  was like open heart surgery.

  Amore cordova - a deep bright wound

  on the body of my life!

  Three hours later

  gray-suited gentlemen in the foyer

  were receiving their coats.

  Someone stepped on my foot; I raised my eyes

  and recognized a celebrity of the season. He was drunk.

  Many of them, as Liuba would explain later,

  came here to drink, rather than watch a "restricted" movie.

  We stepped out into the winter night.

  It was even colder now, so cold

  that the cigarette almost froze to my lip.

  Random human shapes criss-crossed by street-lamp light

  ran along humpbacked lanes as we walked

  home across the town. The buses had stopped running

  an hour ago. After ten minutes of walking it began to snow.

  Liuba shook her blond head like a dog and yelled

  "Amore cordova...". Two echoes returned

  from limestone houses

  drowning in the lucid darkness.

  Snow fell on the river, even under the bridge,

  on the equestrian

  Monument to the Revolutionary Rider,

  turning the horse into a winged sphinx and the man

  into an angel. It fell on government buildings

  and railroad workers" homes alike,

  on wineshops, buses in the bus park, on asphalt

  and the glazed surface of the pond.

  Crossing Lenin Street I turned my head

  and saw the ghost of a bus glowing white.

  I raised my hand and it stopped and opened the front door.

  The front seats were in those days

  upholstered with imitation leather.

  The driver's strong Moldavian accent

  was mellifluous as he told us a joke:

  "It's winter. Two street vendors are having an argument.

  The first says the temperature is 5o Centigrade.

  The other says no, it's 10! The first thinks for a second

  and agrees: "OK, 7 and the temperature's yours!"

Blacklisted Titles

The USSR Academy of Science, local branch,
looking like a chocolate cake from afar
with its neoclassical stucco
moulding on the cornices, stood
in scaffolding before the holidays.
Women in the windows,
armed with buckets and sponges
waved at each other through reflections
of the November sky. The last day of work
before Revolution Day
was coming to an end. An older friend,
a recent university dropout,
who now served in this castle as a librarian,
had called me at noon and whispered: come,
the room will be open for two hours,
and you’ll be there all alone... But hurry
and don’t forget to bring your watch!
I put on my gray sweater to become invisible
and took the # 10 trolleybus and then # 4.
She waited for me in the empty parking lot,
and when I patted her on the shoulder she cursed,
then recognized me, smiled and sleepily
confessed that she was “dying for a smoke.”
We smoked on a bench
my strong cigarettes sans filters.
Her name was Rita, she was nervous and talked a lot.
When Rita talked,
she dropped cigarette ashes around,
peppering the air. At last we went upstairs.
I sneaked into the library right under the nose
of the old monster of a guard, pretending
that I was headed for room 00,
found door number 03, the Restricted Section,
and turned the knob.
In the dim greenish light I saw
stacks of steel laden with famous books
whose authors had fallen into disgrace.
One had fled abroad, another
had written an angry letter to the authorities,
a third had simply gone out of his mind,
and so on and so forth.
All those books,
taken out of the circulation, now marched in files,
stripped of their call numbers, like prisoners of war.
What kind of war was it? Between whom and whom?
Between those who wrote
in the first person plural and those who preferred
the first person singular,
the war of noun cases, of verb tenses,
the cold war of zeroes against natural numbers.
Those were the days when Lolita,
Mandelshtam’s Voronezh Notebooks,
let alone a Solzhenitsyn, could earn you
a couple of years in jail. Those were books
I had dreamed of all my life,
and when I touched them tenderly I touched
the noble velvet of dust on the jackets.
I would read two lines from a volume
and return it to its place, then
pick another and put it back again.
It was too much, too powerful, too enlightening,
“too many notes”, too many tunes at once.
Time gone astray, the early evening
glued the hands of my watch
to the white ice of its dial. The old Cyclops
guarding the entrance/exit had fallen asleep.
I left unseen, intact, blended
into the crowds of people going home,
waiting for buses, loudly talking
about tomorrow’s parade.
It was still pretty light in the city,
but all the streetlights were on,
and red November leaves
flew in the air past neon-flooded windows,
past all the taxis lined up along the curbs,
past the open doors of hotels and stores,
past the Monument to the Unknown Soldier,
past all streetlamps, going south with the birds.
I was happy because I was 16 and overwhelmed
with life, with solitude and the pride of secret
knowledge. I have understood freedom since
as the expanding universe of that room.
As Gorky used to say, it’s no sin to steal a book,
and I would have, if only I’d been able
to limit my choice to one title.

The smell of salt

As we stand in the bright wooden chapel

I look around and recognize

Iskra’s friends and relatives. There are a few babushkas

I have never seen before, who must have come

to Levine’s Funeral Home today

for a rehearsal of their own departures.

They never miss a chance to attend a freebee.

I say goodbye to my sixty-seven year old friend.

A short, plump Winnie-the-Pooh of a lady.

Iskra Kogan

lies with lilies on her high forehead.

The rabbi spin out a complex speech

praising my friend’s great gift for relating to people

and her role in the Russian Jewish community.

His sharply inflected tones are detached,

a clever smile curves his mouth.

But I know that Iskra was a loner,

her only company being her daughter

and a handful of friends.

Her life’s story is simple. She was born in Leningrad,

where her mother worked in a kindergarten

when WWII broke out. There were six children in the group,

and when one cold day their parents

didn’t come to pick them up, her mother had no choice

but to take care of all of them.

They managed to flee from the dying city

one day before the onset of the long blockade

and wandered through a devastated land

all the way to the Urals.

They did not return to Leningrad till after the war.

Then Iskra worked as a proofreader

at the literary journal Zvezda (“Star”)

and met an aging Akhmatova a few times.

Once they even shared a cigarette on the marble stairs

of that famous editorial office on Pestel Street.

Iskra wrote poems from age fifteen,

but never published anything

and never even told her friends about it.

(“I didn’t look like a poet, I was obese.”)

A child of the war, she craved food

more than fame. She liked to eat

and to have a good laugh during a meal.

I loved the poem she once reluctantly recited for me

after an enormous dinner that she had cooked.

She read slowly from a blue notebook,

every letter of her schoolgirlish handwriting

contained a white square: I remember smells

better than anything else: the smell

of Neva water in the rusty canals,

the smell of yellowish galley pages

covered with fresh print,

and finally the smell

of the crude dirty salt I used to buy

during the war, when tears tasted

like melted snow…

from: Katia Kapovich, Gogol In Rome, Paperback: 112 pages, Salt Publishing, Cambridge, UK, ISBN: 1844710467.